Application responsiveness during document navigation is generally limited to the raw speed with which the application can render content to keep up with user navigation. Responsiveness, then, tends to scale based on document complexity and performance characteristics of the machine hardware.
Some products have attempted to address the responsiveness problem by allowing the user to continue to navigate the document while the rendering of the content lags behind. While the application catches up, products show blank content or checkerboard-style patterns to indicate the content is not yet ready. The disadvantage of this scheme is that it greatly diminishes the usefulness of the responsiveness achieved, as the user is unable to see the content while navigating.
Other products have addressed the responsiveness problem by pre-rendering additional content that is not yet on the screen in order to lessen the likelihood that the user navigation is able to get ahead of application rendering. However, the additional resource requirements of keeping the pre-rendered content in memory limits the extent to which content can be pre-rendered and, therefore, the effectiveness of this scheme.